


Out of Left Field

by kira892



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Humanstuck, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-04
Updated: 2013-08-04
Packaged: 2017-12-22 09:02:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/911376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kira892/pseuds/kira892
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I think I want you to be nicer to me though. Then I can be nicer to you too."</p><p>That makes you pause a little and the momentary lapse of your guard allows Mituna to slump forward. It hurts a little when his forehead dives into your shoulder and you make a sound of protest but Mituna shushes you loudly while fumbling around your face with one hand, presumably to put a finger to your lips.</p><p>"Why,  pray tell, would you want that to happen?" You ask, curious.</p><p>You feel him shrug and the hand on your face drops limply to your other shoulder. "I dunno. Isn't that what you're supposed to do? Be nice to people."</p><p>"Well, yes." You sigh heavily. "I would like to be nice to you Mituna, but you make it very difficult."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Out of Left Field

**Author's Note:**

> This is a birthday fic for my lovely, lovely Valerie whose persuasive, big-eyed emoticons and tendency to encourage most of my decisions, crazy or otherwise is largely responsible for my sudden nose-dive into SS Kantuna.
> 
> HAPPY (slightly late) SWEET 16TH SWEETIE

 

You think you're well within reason to believe that life is out to get you.

Of course you are aware that things could always be much worse and you are ever _so_ grateful that no matter how bad you seem to have it, there are always people out there who have it worse than you. Nonetheless, constantly having to be shoved into spaces _just_ outside the borders of your comfort zone (you've spent 68% of your teenage years training yourself to be understanding and considerate, your comfort zone is, if you do say so yourself, pretty god damn huge. which makes it hard to understand why you often find yourself outside it.) is not something you appreciate. At all. You thought graduating highschool and moving into the city would finally put an end to it.

You _hoped_ that moving into an "adult setting" would let you finally stop being surrounded by people whose  ignorance you have to tolerate and patiently, gently try to correct because they haven't been exposed to the same information you have. _But_ of course it's never that easy is it?

University isn't so bad. Embarassingly enough, you've fallen into the common misconception that you would find people like you in your program of choice. And two months into the semester, you still sometimes duck your head and swathe yourself in shame within the safe confines of your mind as you sit in yet another lecture hall and look at all the people around you. Most of them are well outside your age range and so are much wiser than you. It makes you feel like a rowdy school girl when you remember that you've basically gone into the Sociology program like you've stumbled right out of plato's cave.  Your eagerness could more or less be summed up with a mental image of you running into this crowd crying "Finally! Intellectuals! Hello friends, I am just like you and by golly am I ever so glad to find you, everyone around me is an idiot. Would you like to discuss the possible cause of their socially conditioned behavior? Pop culture is a terrible thing is it not?"

You've had several wake up calls since then  courtesy of older students and professors alike that you'd rather not get into.  You would say that they hadn't changed you all that much but they effectively got you to put a firm lid over your zealous crusade to be rid of ignorance. You would still correct someone if need be but now a days you do so considerably less than you used to when most of the things you knew came from the internet.

You're learning that society, though easily observable and thus (should be) understandable is a lot more complex than you thought because it's made up of hundreds of thousands of individuals and individuals in and of themselves are too complex it makes your brain hurt sometimes. They can agree while disagreeing, be rude while being noble, they make you realize a little more everyday that try as you might, you can't really generalize them into groups and speak for them or to them that way.

That realization has you keeping to yourself a hundred percent of the time at campus, finding niches in corners of student lounges, libraries and lecture halls, surrounded by people who are too absorbed with their own thoughts, their own grades and their own theses to even spare you a glance much less engage you in insightful, intelligent conversation about the current state of the world.

And that's not so bad. That's a gorgeous cake that you take gratefully everyday. The city is also not that bad, sure there are some rude people every other corner and some of the streets could stand to be cleaner and less crowded but it's still not that bad.

 Your railroad apartment is also not that bad. Yes the apartment complex would probably be a better place if it lost a few, specific tenants, the walls could stand to be thicker and the stairwells _need_ a good cleaning. But you can deal with all that, even the ridiculous slanting floor of the tiny kitchen in the apartment you managed to rent. None of these things made you feel like life is deliberately testing the soundness of your mind.

What convinces you that it _is_ trying to do that, is the roomate that it just casually decides to toss into your lap like a grenade.

If your highschool years could be summed up in one word, you'd have to say it was painful. And if you had to choose someone you never wanted to see again after you moved out of the subrubs to pursue post secondary education (the list goes on and on but there's a considerable margin separating the person on the top of the list and everyone else because of how much you were done with his existence), that person would be Mituna Captor.

You can come up with a 10 page essay of why exactly that is, things he's done to you personally not withstanding. And if an essay is not acceptable and therefore would have to be condensed into a list, some words one would find at the top under "Why Mituna Captor is an asshole." would be: Rude, Loud, Obnoxious, Gross. He is all of these things so much that you absolutely refuse to tolerate him even knowing he has ADHD. You've done that enough to last you a lifetime and it cost you and if one thing is for sure, you don't care. He would always be the one exception and you just refuse to be patient or understanding with him. Seriously. Fuck that.

Yes, you liked Mituna Captor probably as much as a fly likes glass windows. And lo and behold, of _all_ the people that could have been stuck living in the same apartment as you, it had to be _him_.

As luck, or a clear lack of it thereof, would have it, the only apartment complex close enough to your university and fit within your parents' budget was all filled up except for one apartment which was already half-occupied by someone looking for a person to split the rent with.

You _really_ wished you had _any_ other alternative but unfortunately, you do not.

You guess it's not _that_ bad...every once in a while. The first two weeks is hell, because as many would know, trying to establish boundaries and rules with Mituna is like pulling teeth, with your bare hands.

Leaving the kitchen looking like a war zone and extending that war zone to the living room might have possibly be an accident. It isn't dubious that he just forgot that you specifically told him not to leave soda cans and food wrappers on anywhere that isn't the garbage can. This is Mituna after all, but after you chew him out for it, everything that follows, every violation of the house rules you've established (or tried to) with him, you were sure, was completely intentional and fuelled by merry spite.

You moved in on a Monday and by Friday you already had a noise complaint filed against you. You were already having a bad day. After spending 3 hours running around the city, in the rain, without an umbrella,  looking for the textbook you need because the campus book store was out of stock and you needed the book to do your homework, you came home to find muddy footprints all over the living room and the dirt caked pair of converse responsible for the tracks dumped unceremoniously on top of your _white_ , still relatively new sneakers. You could've given your little brother a run for his money with how loud and angry you were when you barged into Mituna's room and yelled at him for about 10 minutes straight.

To be fair, he did apologize, several times but he also swore at you and conveyed the sentiment of "fucking come at me" with differently phrased, rude remarks. You were half sure that a fist fight might would have broken out if one of the neighbors hadn't come knocking to inform the two of you that it was almost midnight and some people "are trying to fucking sleep."

You offered the man your apologies and hastily retreated to your room but before you could, Mituna muttered, loudly, something along the lines of "no wonder Tula didn't pick you, fucking dick face." 

Faster than any words can come to your brain, your arm was already moving. Words were still beyond you as you snatched up the closest thing, which happens to be Mituna's helmet and chucked it hard at him.  Mituna tries to dodge but you hit him square on the shoulder. When he yelps in pain, your mind finally catches up to you and when you see him stomping angrily in your direction, you practically run to the bathroom (which was the only room in the apartment that had a door) and lock yourself in it for the rest of the night.

Several repeats of this happens throughout the next week because after the first time, Mituna sees to it that he steps on your toes every other day and he pushes a button every 5 minutes whenever you were both home. Telling him that if he's looking to earn all the spite you're capable of, he already has it doesn't deter him one bit and there were more than a few times where you almost screamed your head off at him again but you always catch yourself just in time because that's exactly what he wants and you refused to give him the satisfaction.

Halfway through the next week, you just decide to spend as little time in the apartment as possible. You make your school campus your second home, staying there til midnight almost every day, sneaking naps in random spots in the library so that you could stay awake through what little time before sunrise you have left when you get home.  When you get home, Mituna would either be asleep, too tired to even glance at you, or up to his eyeballs into a videogame. And while he is any of those three things, you move around the apartment, cleaning up any messes he made and pretending that he isn't there.

It usually works, because the combination of lack of sleep and perhaps just a bit too much work to do every night has you spacing out more often than what's probably healthy and sometimes you really do forget you're living with Mituna of all people. But there would always be little things, like his medication scattered haphazardly all over the apartment, his skateboard leaning against the door and his cats. Or what you think might technically be "his" cats.

Some days they're here and some days they're not, that's why you were more than a little convinced at one point that you'd only imagined the yellow cat with the green eyes and the brown tabby cat trotting around the apartment. As it turns out they were real and you've stopped trying to shoo them out with a broom when you saw them lounging on Mituna's lap and his shoulder like they've known him for ages.

"Oh, those are your cats?" You'd asked him.

"Yeah."

"Oh."

You would have said something else but you remembered you're talking to Mituna, who probably doesn't know what he's saying half the time. So you just assume the cats were one of the several that wander into the apartment complex every other week and he took a liking to them so they kept coming back now and then to get food and scratches from him. You also hadn't seen any fur on anything (that is yours anyway) or any untoward cat byproducts. Or maybe you just couldn't be bothered to care because there were still three essays waiting to be done back in your room at the time and there's a 100% chance Mituna won't listen to you if you told him to kick them out, so you just turned and left.

Ocassionally, the brown cat would wander into your room and just...sit there and stare at you, as if Mituna had trained it to do that to make you uncomfortable. After the first five times that you've nudged it out back into Mituna's room, it just took to lying on your feet everytime it intrudes on you. Eventually, you just stop caring, you have better things to do.

Months pass, you and Mituna still dislike each other but somehow, the two of you manage to live together without setting the other on fire. Of course you still fight, because he's still an ass and he still pulls stupid shit like leaving the stove on and setting the fire alarm blaring at 3 AM in the morning. And every now and then, he'll forget to take his meds and he'd get so restless he would rearrange everything in the living room. When that still doesn't get him to settle down, he'll go into your room and annoy the ever living shit out of you for shits and giggles, or maybe he does it so that you'll engage him in a physical fight and it would give him something to do. Or maybe he's just being his usual douchey self. You just don't know.

Every so often you'd lose it and you would hit him once or twice but you would reign your anger in and you would ignore him until he apologizes and moves on to go do something else. Every time, just before he walks out of your room, you tell him to take his pills if he hasn't already. He always says okay but you don't know if he ever actually listens to you or not. So long as he doesn't come back to bother you while you have 54 pages of material to read and analyze, you figure you don't have to care.

By the time winter rolls around, "constant untowardly incidents courtesy of one douchebag which then results into fights or something, with bits of constant absences from both parties in the middle" just becomes "everyday life"  For the most part, you just learn to deal with him and he does the same with you. You avoid the apartment a little less because of it and the increase in sleep and rest does wonders for you. Also, Mituna takes to disappearing more often.  You're not sure exactly what he's majoring in so you don't know if half the time he's gone, he's somewhere in his own campus doing school stuff.  You do know that at least some of the time, he's out with people because he takes his helmet and his board out with him. When cans of spray paint start turning up in the apartment, you figure he's running around the city vandalizing bridges, walls and sidewalks.

Around the time this happens, you manage to get youself a job so though you'd have liked to reprimand him, you don't get the time to because you're home possibly even less than you were during the few weeks you'd avoided him like the plague. And whenever you are, he's either not there or passed out on the couch, on the floor or in his own room.

You do manage to catch him eventually and that encounter doesn't go down exactly like you thought it would.

You'd just come home yourself and after putting away some canned goods and instant food you got from the convenience store aroundthe corner, Mituna stumbles into the apartment, quite literally. He falls on his face as soon as he crosses the threshold, sending one of his two cats (the yellow one) jumping about 3 feet in the air and dashing off to hide into his room. The brown, much calmer cat pokes its head out from your room and you and it both stare at Mituna as you lean against the sink, crossing your arms over your chest and waiting for him to get up so you can give him some due reprimanding.

"Unless you want to stay down there all night, I recommend that you get up right now because if you end up passing out on the floor, I regret to inform you that I will simply leave you there to wake up with a sore back tomorrow morning." You say.

Mituna grumbles loudly against the floorboards and clumsily pushes himself up. Once he's on his feet, he walks over to the fridge, opens it and steals an a bottle of vitamin water from your side. This isn't the first time he's taken something from your side of the fridge so you just glare at him while he chugs down a quarter of it in one go.

"Have you been spray painting graffiti on public property?" You ask him bluntly.

"No." Mituna says, fiddling with the cap of the bottle he was holding.

You quirk an eyebrow. "Yes you have."

"No." Mituna just says again, swaying his head to the side quickly and sending the unkempt mop of dirty blonde hair hanging over his eyes swishing. He giggles like its the funniest thing in the world and almost falls over from how hard he's laughing, nearly knocking into you and that's when you smell it on him.

"Are you high?" You ask, pushing him away in disgust, nose wrinkled.

"No." Mituna manages to get out through giggles, leaning back into your personal space. You put your hand on the middle of his chest and shove him away none too gently, snatching the bottle away from him and setting it safely near the sink before he gets it all over you.

"Can you make use of anything in your evidently diminished vocabulary other than no?" You ask flatly.

"No." Mituna says, leaning in yet again. He grabs your arm before you can shove him away again and puts his face uncomfortably close to yours. He reeks of weed and you see one green eye peek out at you from behind the curtain of his hair as he pokes at your eyebrow. "Your thingies are really long."  He says and from the way his finger and brushes against your lashes, you're assuming that's what he's referring to.

"How observant of you."

"They're pretty."

"Pretty is an adjetive plenty of women and men alike my age do not appreciate being associated with. Because pretty is more appropriate for use by children with regards to socially deemed 'feminine' items desiganted for little girls. Do I look like a little girl's item to you? No, I don't."

"I have no clue what the fuck you just said."

"Of course not."

"You're a fcken douchebag."

"As you've informed me on multiple occasions. You are too, as I know you're well aware bu-"

"I think I want you to be nicer to me though. Then I can be nicer to you too."

That makes you pause a little and the momentary lapse of your guard allows Mituna to slump forward. It hurts a little when his forehead dives into your shoulder and you make a sound of protest but Mituna shushes you loudly while fumbling around your face with one hand, presumably to put a finger to your lips. 

"Why,  pray tell, would you want that to happen?" You ask, curious.

You feel him shrug and the hand on your face drops limply to your other shoulder. "I dunno. Isn't that what you're supposed to do? Be nice to people."

"Well, yes." You sigh heavily. "I would like to be nice to you Mituna, but you make it _very_ difficult."

"I'm sorry."

You don't answer because he's not in a state where he means what he says and you're pretty sure that even if he's stone cold sober, he still wouldn't mean it.

"Why do you even hate me so much? Are you still mad bout Tula?"

"Don't be ridiculous, my disapproval of you has nothing to do with Latula."

"You're lying."

You shove him away again, with a little more force than necessary. He stumbles, tries to regain his footing and falls flat on his ass.

"I haven't so much as spoken to you in 2 years before we got stuck with each other. Please _do not_ presume things about me. It's terribly rude to say the least."

"You're just making it seem more true." Mituna says, reaching up to lift his bangs away from his blue eye. You'd forgotten his eyes were two different colors and seeing it again in person is kind of surreal. It brings back memories, pleasant and unpleasant alike, that have you crossing your arms and lowering your hackles a little.

"Well it's not. You really assume I'll still be upset with you for something that happened when we were 15? I know you don't think highly of me at all but assuming I'm that immature is just insulting. Besides, I will have you know that even at the time, I fully respected Latula's choices. I wasn't necessarly happy with them but I was by no means upset or even displeased enough to hold a grudge against you for years."

"I'm sorry."

"...It's okay."

There was a bit of a pause, thick and awkward and just before you walk away and pretend none of the things you've said were ever heard, Mituna stops you with three simple words.

"I felt bad."

Knowing he might not even remember any of this come morning, you walk away and pause when you're far enough from him.  "There are a lot of things you ought to feel bad about. But that isn't one of them."

 Things are rather awkward after that. Or at least they feel that way to you. Because that conversation in the kitchen has opened up a gateway to the past, something that you never ever wanted to get into if you could help it because as far as you were concerned, the moment Mituna stopped being your friend, the title was lost to him forever. You'd hoped (and you're not entirely unsure because again,  this is Mituna) that Mituna was too baked to remember any of it but after that short moment in the kitchen, he was less...Mituna. He doesn't change a lot, not at all, but enough that it was noticeable.

He steals your food less, leaves your stuff alone instead of hiding them or doodling rude or obscene little figures on them when you accidentally leave them in the living room and on one strange occasion, even stops to say hi and ask how your day was when he passed by your room to get to his.

These possible attempts at friendship get ignored for the most part. You appreciate them but still. You're not interested in being Mituna's friend. Which sounds kind of bad you suppose. You're more than happy to be an acquaintance and you'd gladly be a roomate that gets along with him well enough but if there was ever a chance that you and Mituna could be friends, that window closed a long, long time ago when you were both completely different people. It's just not possible anymore.

Or at least that's what you think until the day you break your arm.

You had never ever broken a bone, nor have you ever been victim to an injury that was even remotely close, so on the day you slip in the shower and land on your arm with an alarming 'SNAP', you, to put it mildly, freak the fuck out. The moment white-hot pain explodes in your arm you know it's broken and the knowledge coupled with the excruciating pain has you feeling sick to your stomach and terrified, so much that you keep slipping and couldn't get out of the tub.

You haven't been this scared ever since you were little and in the height of your fear, your body decides to act for you and without consulting your brain first, decides to shout for Mituna.

You curse loudly after the second time you yell his name, realizing he probably isn't even home and there are several awful, awful seconds where your world shrinks down to nothing but the searing pain in your arm  and the too loud sounds of your frantic pulse and the hot water from the shower beating against your prone body.

Then the unexpected happens in the form of a knock at the door and a familiar voice calling out your name. You jump, accidentally jostling your broken arm and making you scream in pain. When you do, Mituna, who is apparently now on the other side of the door knocks one more time. "What?? What'd I do this time???" He pauses for two seconds and when he speaks again, he says "Kankri? You okay?"

"NO I AM NOT FUCKING OKAY! HELP!"

Once again, you mouth decides to go ahead and work without your brain's approval but at this point you're in so much pain you just don't care. Your shrill, angrily pained shout gets a loud thump in response and you look at the door curiously, just before the wood splinters right next to the door knob. With another loud thump, it flies open, sending the broken off knob along with other splintered bits and pieces, scattering on the floor.

"Did you just break the door??!" You ask incredulously, mircaulously finding the ability to stop worrying about your broken arm for a second in order to worry about the extra bucks that will go into your bills because of the door.

"Fuck yeah I did, you're screaming your head off like you accidentally cut your dick off or something." Rght as he hits the period of that sentence, you and Mituna simultaneously realize that you're in the same room, looking at each other, while you're naked. The knowledge that Mituna has seen, _is_ seeing you naked, squicks you so much,  you temporarily lose the ability to curse out loud but its okay because he swears loud enough for the both of you.

You hurriedly reach over to shield your groin in a feeble attempt at modesty the same time Mituna 's palms fly up and _smacks_ into his eyes. Your simultaneous yelps of pain echoes in the bathroom when your other arm gets jostled again and Mituna falls over with how hard he tried to cover his eyes.

"Mituna oh my god for _fuck_ 's sake, I think my arm is broken." You practically wail.

"Wha?" Mituna asks oh so eloquently as he jolts up and shuffles forward a few inches on his knees to lean on the tub and stare at your shoulder like just looking at it would confirm wether or not the arm attached to it is damaged or not.

Mituna glances at your face, or at least that's what you assume form the infinitesimal tilting of his head, it's pretty much impossible to tell where he's looking because of his ridiculous hair. You're about to yell at him again but before you can, he reaches over and starts prodding at your arm. He hits _something_ on the second prod and you almost scream. You don't quite do that but you do yell out a rather rude expletive that has Mituna looking slightly worried. "Oh. Your arm is broken."

"I _know_ and I believe I fucking told you that already." You hiss at him, still reeling from the slight increase in pain his prodding has accomplished.

Mituna makes a disgruntled noise but keeps his stupid mouth shut long enough to slide an arm under your back and around your ribs to help you up. It takes a lot of cursing, maneuvering and even more cursing for Mituna to get the job done but by the time you're on your feet, he's surprisingly helpful. Or as helpful as Mituna can ever be. He doesn't even make that much of a fuss when you insist on putting some pants on before driving to the ER.

"Here, hold this." He says as you struggle to get your loafers on. He shoves a frozen pack of peas wrapped in a dish towel in your good hand before dashing to his room. You hold it to the rapidly swelling, crooked bend of your forearm and before you take it away to readjust it, Mituna is back and draping one of his zip up hoodies over your bare shoulders. He also has your keys in one hand and you want to protest against him driving your car (can he even drive??) but before you can utter a word, he throws an arm over your shoulder and starts to guide you out of the apartment.

As it turns out, he _can_ drive and even has a license and you have no clue how the hell he earned it because unsurpisingly, his driving is horrendous and terrifying. He probably breaks 15 traffic laws in the 10 minute drive it takes to go to the hospital and if you aren't in so much pain, you'd have scolded his ear off for driving _your_ car so recklessly.

By the time you get out of the car, you're almost in tears and under the pack of peas, your arm looks like there's a grapefruit embedded under your skin. The tears spill over when you accidentally brush against the door frame. Mituna notices _of course_ because if its not obvious enough, this is another one of life's attempts at (as karkat would probably put it) "kicking you in the asshole with its shit-caked, steel- toed boot"

"Are you seriously crying?"

"Don't even start with me Mituna, I swear to god."

and...he doesn't, much to your surprise. So you actually put effort in to be as patient as possible with him when you sit down to fill the standard form in and he serves as your hand because your writing one is currently incapacitated.

"What's that word?" He asks, pointing at a question on the form. You don't bother answering him, just tick off the answers while squeezing at the half melted pack of peas in your hand to distract youself from the pain.

"Asthma and type 2 diabetes."

Mituna groans. "How do you spell that?"

You sigh, impatient and irritated, and tell him. Once the pen stops moving across paper, Mituna stares at it for two seconds then turns to you. "You have diabetes? Since when?"

You pretend to look at the flourescent lamps in order to distract yourself more from the insistent feeling that your arm is being squeezed under a steam roller. _Just around the time you turned into a little shit and started calling me names and pushing me into lockers among other things_. There was a very small part of you that was tempted to say it, half out of curiosity to see what he'd say and half because you think it's happened so long ago that mentioning it won't have any effect whatsoever.

"Since I was 13."

Mituna makes a noise like he's confused, and you glance at him out of the corner of your eye. He doesn't say anything, just looks back at the form he filled out for you and starts tapping the pen against it repeatedly. You watch his hand while he does it and you blink, noticing what has to be at least 7 or 8 rubberbands on his wrists, on _each_ wrist. Your lips part, tempted to ask but you don't. You just sit in awkward silence with Mituna by your side and wonder for the first time since your world decided to collide with his again, exactly what happened to him after the two of you have more or less dropped out of each other's lives.

When a nurse comes along to check your vitals, it slips your mind up until the moment she glances at the vans hoodie still draped over your shoulders, glances at Mituna and gives him a somewhat dirty look, that hospitals are required by law to ask if you're being controlled in order to help people who might be in abusive relationships. You blush a little and explain to her that "No, he's my roomate, he's irritating at the best of times but he's okay."

"You're irritating too asshole." Mituna says, indignant.

"Shut up Mituna."

The nurse raises her eyebrows and seems to accept that she'd pegged you and Mituna wrong.  She finishes up taking your vitals and takes your form, informing you that they'll get your arm fixed up shortly. Once she leaves, there was a few moments of silence that eventually gets disrupted by Mituna poking at the bag of peas on your arm.

"What?" you ask.

"Let me see."

You move the peas away from your arm and you grimace at the discolored bump on it. Did it look _this_ crooked before? You think you're gonna be sick.

Mituna clicks his tongue and makes a noise like he's just remembered something. "We should've put it into a splint. I forgot you had to do that. Damn it."

"When did you become an expert on broken bones?" You murmur absently, still continuing to stare and grimace at your arm.

"Iunno. I broke a lot of em."

You don't doubt that, considering how clumsy he is, not to mention reckless in the somewhat really stupid kind of way. "Hmm." You say, disinterested, breathing deeply through your nose and tilting your head up to stare at the ceiling, trying to hold on for a bit longer. You really wish you had a higher pain tolerance.

"Are you okay?"

"No."

"You're taking it a lot better than I thought you would."

"Really?" You ask, still looking up at the ceiling. "And how well did you think I would take it exactly?"

You think you see Mituna shrug out of the corner of your eye.

"Like a bitch."

"Ah. Dare I waste my time and effort explaining to you how rude that is?"

"No?"

There was a pause, then you jump a little in surprise when Mituna's finger is suddenly under your bangs, tracing a line across your forehead. "What on earth are you doing?" you ask.

"Remember in 3rd grade, we fell out of a tree. You had a cut there." He taps your forehead. "It was bleeding a little but you thought it was a lot, and you hurt your ankle but you can walk and you even went to school the next day. But you cried like a bitch. Sorry." He amends , like he actually means it. "I don't know how else to describe it. I broke a bone, or twoo...? I was more hurt i remember, but i didnt cry and you did."

Your eyebrows furrow and mixed feelings arise as the memory resurfaces in your mind. You did cry a lot back then but not just because you were hurt. You remember crying a lot because Mituna was hurt and you thought you would get in trouble because you didn't stop him and you should've known better. And also, well...he was your friend and yes he got bad ideas sometimes but he's nice to you and you liked him so you felt like it was your job to keep him in line and keep him from doing stuff like climb a tree with thin branches that could easily snap.

"You remember that?" you ask, glancing at him through your peripheral vision.

"Yeah. You wouldn't let go of my arm."

Your eyebrows furrow. You don't remember that particular detail. You remember hugging him and crying apologies into his shoulder while also trying and failing to scold him but that was it.

"You cried so much, _I_ started crying." Mintuna adds with a little snort.

"I'm surprised you remember." And you are. Up until now you've been convinced he doesn't remember even knowing you before you hit puberty. Even your own memory is a little fuzzy on the matter.

"You usually cried whenever someone else cried." you say.

"I cried because you started breathing weird like you do when you were getting an asthma attack and i was scared."

"Why were you scared?" you ask, turning your head so that you were looking straight at him. Mituna shrugs again, and like the words don't carry anything, simply says. "You were my friend."

You go quiet at that and he does too. The silence gets a little too heavy too quickly so you just face forward and go back to staring at the ceiling and counting down the indefinitely long queue of seconds until your arm doesn't hurt anymore.

Thankfully, they patch you up soon after that and you're saved from having to exchange any more words with Mituna while they set the bone in your arm, wrap it up in a cast and give you instructions on how to live with the bulky, solid lump of fiberglass around your arm for the next couple of months.

Mituna doesn't bring up what was said in the ER, nor does he bring up anything even related to what was said, which you appreciated. He does help you make dinner though, seeing as you are right handed and your right hand is currently encased in stiff, hard fiberglass up to your elbow. And the two of you sit down together in your living room to eat dinner together for the first time since you've moved in. You barely get to eat, not only because spooning food into your mouth is slightly more difficult when you do it with your left hand but because Mituna would not stop talking to you.

He tries to give you advice on how to deal with having a cast and gets sidetracked into telling you somewhat gross stories about his own experiences. This happens about 5 times until he gets annoyed with you trying to moderate his language everytime he tries to accurately depict how painful or annoying something was.

The night ends after a long discussion that was mostly composed of you talking to Mituna about how you might (absolutely) require his help for the next few months while your arm heals. He agrees to help you with chores and just gives you an ambiguous grunt when you brought up needing help with doing your homework. You doubt he'd pull through on either of those things but oh well. You were tired and itching to take more painkillers than you're supposed to, you'll deal with him some other time.

He bids you goodnight when he passes by your room to get to his, which after everything that's happened so far, just made the entire day surreal. He leaves before you can say it back and even though he can easily hear you if you just say it, you don't. You just crawl under your covers, turn the light off and go to sleep feeling slightly impressed with the realization that Mituna Captor can apparently be a decent person sometimes.

Mituna more or less reverts to his normal behavior the very next day, and as you expected, seems to forget that he agreed to assist you in areas of life you now need assisting with. Although he does listen every now and then when you remind him that it's hard to wash dishes or do the laundry one handed. Sometimes you get into petty fights because he's in the mood to be a lazy asshole or he's "busy". This goes on for about a week until you come home late one night, almost shaking with how hopped up you are on shitty coffee after spending 7 hours cooped up in the library working on a thesis and trip on a passed out Mituna in the living room.

It was well past midnight  and you're pretty sure you wake up the tenants living in the aparment under you with how hard you come crashing, cast first, on the cold, hard floor. If the thundering sound of your body falling so hard, the cupboards rattle doesn't do it, then your loud scream of pain would have for sure. Mituna wakes up to the sound of you muffling expletives and tears into your sleeve. 

He'd apparently passed out drunk on the floor and on that night, you find out three things: It's about 600 times easier to reduce Mituna to tears when he's drunk, you apparently turn downright frightening when you're tired and in a lot of pain, despite it being your less dominant side, you can dish out decent slaps with yor left hand and a well aimed, forceful hit to the face does wonders for reducing someone's drunkeness.

Mituna retreats to his room after you downright shriek at him to "Get the _fuck_ out of my sight or so help me!" You manage to gulp down some painkillers when you muster the will to get up and go find some then you spend the rest of the night, calming down while waiting for them to take effect.

At some point past 3 am, Mituna's cat, the brown tabby that likes to use you as a bed every so often, wanders into your room, mewling curiously. You throw a hairbrush at it but unlike Mituna, it doesn't so much as flinch. You glare at it dourly, sending off threatening vibes as it trots closer and jumps up on your bed. It simply ignores you and returns your stare with a calm fearlessness that may or may not be borne of simple obliviousness to your foul mood. It's still staring at you even as it curls up cautiously on your shins and rests its chin near your knee, licking at it a few times through your blanket like it was trying to soothe you on Mituna's behalf. You opt to just ignore it because you're still tired and you're still in pain and you still have to polish off your thesis by tomorrow morning because your essay is due in 24 hours.

You don't speak to Mituna for two full days and you'd have liked to keep the silence going for much longer but unfortunately, your arm is still broken and everyday life is still kind of a little difficult without the help of somebody else. Also, you're a legal adult, though you like to take liberties with your behaviour considering you're not 20 yet and therefore still have room to mature in certain aspects of your behavior towards certain people, you think its about time you start acting like a grown up.

You attempt to be the bigger person and break the silence by asking him to reach the can of ravioli on the highest shelf when you were attempting to make yourself real food for once. Mituna looked for a second like he wanted nothing more than to flip you off and ignore you, or get up and knock over the can so that it falls on your head. You brace yourself for either of these things and you get about three paragraphs of what to say to him in either scenario constructed in your head before Mituna scowls, takes a deep breath, reaches under his sleeve and pulls at several rubber bands. Your eyebrows go up when he lets go and they smack against his wrist with a loud snap. He hisses a little, then without another word, gets up and does as you asked.

"Thank you." You murmur.

He grunts and scratches at his scalp. "You're still an asshole."

You blink calmly at him. "So are you." And you leave it at that, opting to focus your attention on opening your can of ravioli. "I do apologize for yelling and swearing at you though. I don't think you're blameless but I admit I could have reprimanded you a little bit better." You can't help adding after a few seconds because _someone_ had to act like an adult and who else would that be but you?

Mituna grumbles and swears under his breath but he shrugs and says "I'm sorry too I guess."

"I accept your apology I guess."

You say, pouring the ravioli into a bowl. Mituna makes a curious noise at that and you glance at him just as he tilts his head at you. "Are you being nice to me?"

"Yes." It came out a little questioning but for the most part you think you mean it. You have three tests to study for and another paper to get started on. You'd like all the peace of mind you can get. "Would you rather I wasn't? I don't know about you but I'm starting to get tired of constantly knocking heads with you."

Mituna just makes unintelligible noises and bends down to pick up one of his cats when one of them trots over and starts walking around in circles around his feet.  "It's fun to piss you off. But like, I don't want to actually hurt you though. Cause you're tiny and skinny, hurting you is just wrong." he says, scratching at the thick yellow fur on top of his cat's head.

There were so many things you could say to that. You could condescend to him and act surprised that he's aware of that, you could do what you've done since day one and treat him like a child, ask him why he doesn't act more decent when he's perfectly aware of what's right and wrong or you could simply say _huh, you had no issues with that when we were younger_ but you don't say any of those thngs. Because maybe, difficult though it may be, it was probably time that you recognize this is Mituna the irritating room mate that you haven't bothered to actually know at all not Mituna the fickle, naive 12 year old that gave in to the tides of change and left you stranded on dry land, alone and isolated.

You just ask him to grab another can of ravioli and you heat him his own bowl. You don't eat together like you did the night you broke your arm but Mituna thanks you and even washes his own bowl.

Within the next couple of months, the levels of hostility between the two of you slowly recede until they're surprisingly tolerable as Mituna becomes less of a huge thorn in your side and more of a vulgar but largely non hostile, constant presence that aids you here and there with little things like picking up things that fall to your right, lifting things you can't and ocasionally helping you get your cast through a sleeve. 

He still makes lewd and inappropriate comments much more than you would like because he's Mituna but now you get the feeling that it was mostly due to his ADHD and not because he's saying them just to get your mouth running and dishing out lecture after lecture until you're so exasperated you can't stand it.  Of course he still does the latter sometimes because he still likes to annoy you but slowly, you learn to just ignore it and see it as mostly harmless fun, not actual acts of abhorrence. Sometimes, a verbal crack at you would actually lead to conversation and it happens again and again until conversations become a semi-regular thing.

Over the course of another month you find out things about him that makes you really realize how little you interacted with him prior to breaking your arm.

He's apparently legally blind in one eye, which would explain why he was so damn clumsy. You raise an eyebrow at him in skepticism when you find out, before immediately asking why on earth he still thinks it's a good idea to skateboard. To which he simply answers "cause i want to!" When asked what happened, he says  "Car accident. I don't really like talking about it." So you don't make him but you still amend that though his disability should not restrict him from doing what he likes, skateboarding is still dangerous. Mituna simply points out that he's been doing it for quite a while and that "I'm not the one whose arm is broken."

His partial blindness is horrible for skateboarding but  very useful for art, which was what he was majoring in apparently. You find this out when he asks if he can draw on your cast and you refuse until he clings to your leg and absolutely refuses to let go unless you say yes.  When he starts making _incredibly_ inappropriate comments about you, or more specifically, your body (seriously god damn whatever may be damned for letting him see you naked) in a horrible attempt at flattery, you let him grab a red marker and scribble a surprisingly decent, cartoonized little version of you on your cast. It's apparently easier to draw with just one eye. It has something to do with the difference between 2d and 3d. You're not sure, you just hear garbled gibberish when Mituna attempts to explain it to you.

He has a somewhat unhealthy obsession with butterfingers and his poor cats are apparenty named Butter and Kitkat as you find out when you walk in on him letting Butter (the yellow one) eat crumbs of the candy it's named after, off his palm.  When asked why the brown tabby that's unofficially taken a liking to you was named Kitkat, Mituna makes a show of just randomly snatching up the poor thing (who was drinking out of a saucer of water Mituna set out for it), holding it by its front legs and swaying him around like a toy. The cat doesn't so much as flinch, not even when Mituna drapes it over the back of his neck like a towel.  "Look at him, he's so chill." he says, lightly grabbing Kitkat's head and manipulating it like he was making it talk "Have a break, have a kitkat." You just shake your head, sigh and sympathize with the poor, unfortunately named things, making a mental note to be even more accomodating towards Kitkat because you now understand why it sneaks into your room often.

The last and most intriguing thing you find out about him is that the rubberbands on his wrist are apparently leftovers from an allegedly horrible, short-lived experience in a mental ward. Apparently shortly after graduation, his ADHD gave way to horrendous behaviour (which involves multiple people pressing charges and one instance of arrest. you suspect it has something to do with the people he's chosen to associate with, and the bad habits they'd imposed on him) that weekly visits to a therapist hadn't been enough anymore. You don't get the full story from him not just because of his inability to speak of one subject without drifting off into dozens of others but from what you can piece together, he was admitted into a psychiatric ward for perhaps a handful of months until they were convinced they'd reformed his behavior enough to unleash him back out into the world.

In exchange for all of  these things, you let Mituna find out things about you too, like the fact that though you've grown out of letting him, or anyone else for that matter, push you around, it really doesn't take much to get you to exercise basic courtesy. Like children, the two of you slowly relearn the golden rule, there are still lots of bumps along the way because you're you and he's him and getting along 100 percent just seems to be an inability the two of you possess. But for the most part, the chaotic, jagged plane that is your lives settle into something almost bearable.

You let him know of the trivial little things about you as well, managing either to trust him enough not to be a huge dick about any of them, or just not caring anymore if he was or not.  He makes fun of you when you let him know that Porrim taught you how to knit and you've clung to the knowledge for your own enjoyment and convenience but he's near ecstatic, if a bit befuddled when his ratty old beanie gets lost somewhere in the subway and you knit him a new one.  You even make it out of red and blue yarn despite how attrocious you think the color combination is because his old one had the same colors.  Mituna gets so impressed and happy, he offers you candy before remembering you were diabetic and apologizing. He earns a small smile.

With things going better than you could've ever dreamed they can with Mituna, it comes as ~~no~~ a surprise that life decides to throw another curve ball at you. Because evidently you've lost the belief that it was out to get you.

It does this by letting you know two things: Life is going almost well? We can't have that. You're almost become friends with Mituna? Oh definitely can't have that either. And how does life let you know this?

By getting you unjustly fired from your job, sending your mark plummeting for one class because your professor conveniently forgot that he'd given you an extention on your paper because having a broken arm makes typing up 10 pages of material significantly harder than it would be for someone whose arm is not broken, and losing your wallet (which has your student ID, your debit card, credit card and driver's license) all within the span of two days.

You get so stressed out that you actually _wish_ you'd have an asthma attack just so you could have the momentary relief using an inhaler would bring you. But it doesn't happen and in the wake of being extrememly upset and anxious, you turn to one of your worst habits. An hour or two after losing your wallet, you gather up all the spare change you keep lying around your room and buy yourself a pack of smokes.

When Mituna comes home, he finds you smoking your second cigarette in the fire escape. He walks into the apartment calling your name because you'd sent him about 5 frantic texts, asking if he'd seen your wallet around the apartment incase you'd just imagined putting it in your pocket before you left. You didn't of course. Because life is a bitch.

You don't plan on letting Mituna know you're home but he sees you anyway. He must have spotted your favorite stoplight red turtle neck peeking in through the window  which was bright enough for someone whose one functioning eye is constantly hiding behind a thick curtain of hair to see from ten feet away. When he slides the window open and pokes his head out, you acknowledge him by turning your head ever so slightly to the right, lit cigarette hanging out the side of your mouth. He opens his mouth when he notices, stares, closes his mouth, and stares some more. You just stare back at him, taking a long drag of your cigarette and letting the smoke snake out of the corner of your mouth and your nostrils.

"Are you smoking?" Mituna asks after several, long seconds of awkward silence.

You inhale some more smoke and pull the cigarette out from between your lips. "Yes."

"I thought you had asthma."

And instead of trying to rationalize your destructive behaviour to him and perhaps air out some of the contents of your tortured psychological profile in the process, you decide you don't care enough if he gets the satisfaction of knowing that you're just like everybody else, just as stupid and just as angry.

 You exhale a small cloud of smoke. "So?" You ask, averting your eyes and sticking the cigarette back in your mouth.

"Uhh, why?" Mituna asks, leaning a bit more out into the fire escape.

You shrug. "Bcausei'mupset." You murmur softly around the cigarette. You don't think Mituna hears because he just stands there in silence for another several awkward seconds but then he actually steps out to the fire escape and sits a foot or two away from you, letting his legs dangle out of the rectangular hole made for the stairs. "Why? because you lost your wallet?" he asks, swining his legs back and forth.

"Among other things. Listen, I don't want to be rude but I would appreciate it if you could leave me alone right no-"

"Cigarettes won't help much. If you really want to not be upset, I got stuff you can smoke that would work."

Your head snaps to the side to look at him with an incredulously arched eyebrow, stunned that he's suggesting what he's suggesting. Your mouth opens as a reflex, about to reprimand him for possession of illegal substances and then reprimand him more for offering them to you. Before you can get a word out however, your phone rings in your pocket and you take a few seconds to answer it. It was work, or what used to be work. Mituna watches in silent curiosity as you very quickly lose your patience with the former co-worker who is currently calling you, trying to get you to basically beg your manager for your job back. You get to the point of raising your voice after about ten minutes, which is much shorter than it usually takes for you to completely lose your temper with someone who isn't Mituna or anyone else that's wronged you before. And just before you start swearing and cursing into the phone, you grit your teeth and forcefully end the conversation before hanging up with a loud sigh and a deep, deep drag from your cigarette.

"Who was that?" Mituna asks.

"Work. Or more accurately, what used to and never will be again, work."

"You got fired?" He asks and the excited interest in his voice is inappropriate and incredibly irritating.

"Yes."

"What'd you do? Throw a bitch fit at a customer who was racist or sexist or something?"

"Mituna, fuck off...Please." You add as an afterthought because you're really not in the mood for a fight right now. Well, you suppose you are but you have a strong feeling that if you engage in one with Mituna, you'd end up having an asthma attack that, considering how upset you are and considering how much you've smoked, would turn out to be a painful, horrible one.

Mituna goes quiet for the third time since he got home. You'd hope that meant he actually picked up on the severity of your mood and is choosing to not be a douche about it but eventually, you hear him ask.

"Are you sure you don't want to smoke with me? It'll make you feel better."

You turn to look at him and when you do, he has one hand in his hair, holding it back and away from his eyes. You don't know which one is the blind one so your gaze first focuses on his green eye and then the blue. Both of which were alight with mischief and the faintest trace of what could possibly be slight concern.

You breathe in more toxic smoke and as the acrid taste of chemicals rests on your tongue, somewhere in the back of your mind, the cool, collected and rational part of your brain that hasn't been affected by the horrible series of events that's recently happened to you reels in shock and shakes its head at you, disappointed for even hesitating to tell Mituna no.

Then your phone rings again, its your ex-workplace again and you punch the lights out on the reasonable part of you.

For the second time since you've moved in with Mituna, you learn three new things in the span of a few hours or less.

One: Mituna is not all that different when he's high. Or maybe it just seems that way when you're high too. Or maybe you just never noticed that you've actually gotten to know him well enough to be able to tell the difference. If there was one.  You think the only diffence really is that the things he blurts out because of his ADHD are a lot more...serious, and a lot more personal. 

From all you've read about marijuana, you didn't actually expect to get high the first time you smoke it. But go figure, it ends up happening and when you were far enough gone to lose your filters, you ask Mituna again about what happened to his eye. He tells you, straight up with no hesitation and even a little, sardonic laugh: "Drove drunk, no seatbelts on. Before we t-boned this other car, I tried to cover Tula, got my skull bashed up, and made my eye blind. I was in a coma for a week. Tula broke up with me right after cause she thought it was her fault." While he's at the topic of his life, Mituna also tells you about his time in the psychiatric ward. Apparently Mituna remained close friends with Kurloz Makara after highschool, Kurloz Makara who took to using much more dangerous substances than weed after he graduated and who dragged Mituna down with him as he got worse.

Mituna himself isn't even sure of what happened to him exactly, just that _something_ of the several things Kurloz made him try fucked with his system and contributed to him being confined to the psychiatric ward. He claims his memory is foggy on the subject. He does recall "I think I changed enough that it was making Tula mad though and i think that's why she wanted out too." though.  You only offer him a nod and a sympathetic pat to the shoulder.

When you recount to him the tale of how a co-worker of yours almost lost a hundred dollars by misplacing it in the wrong till and stashing it under the safe and then blaming it on you when management freaked out about _a hundred frikking dollars going missing_ , he returns the sympathetic pat you gave him and comments, dazed and not completely in the present with you: "Your friend still sounded like a better bro than Kurloz was after we both landed in rehab."

"He wasn't my friend." You say. "And why do you say that?"

"He was fucked in the head too, it got worse when he started using hardcore shit." He laughed. "You were a better friend than he was when we first moved in together. that's how bad he was."

You raise an eyebrow at him. "I didn't even like you and i treated you like  a 'better friend?'"

"Yeah."

"That's just sad."

Mituna just shrugs and rolls up another joint.

Two: Losing your speech filters apparently also involves losing your grip on what you do or do not want him to know. As soon as a thought enters your head, it doesn't get banished or expressed depending on its nature, it just gets expressed no matter what it is.

At one point, the two of you spend what feels like hours, talking about random, uninteresting things about the apartment, post secondary, and the city, and managing to find at least 2 dozen things that are hilarious about each one and just laughing at them for minutes on end.  Somehow Mituna ends up squished up next to you even though the two of you were sitting on the floor of his room and messy though it is, there was more than enough floor space to let him _not_ be almost on your lap.  You're high enough not to care.

"Why did we ever stop being friends?" Mituna asks out of nowhere, leaning his head against the curve of your shoulder.

"Because you turned into a dick." you say with a small giggle because you can't believe you're saying this to him out loud and the pot is making you think calling him a dick is funny.

"You turned into a dick too." Mituna says, swatting at your knee halfheartedly.

"I did nooot." You say, indignant. "In case you'd forgotten, _I_  wasn't the one who found new friends, left the only one i had since kindergarten and started tripping him in hallways, blowing spitballs at him and calling him fat and ugly. And in case you missed the insinuation, that was you. You." You say, shoving him off your shoulder and poking him in the arm.

Mituna grumbles and slaps your hand away. "I know that! See, this is what i mean. You were a dick too because then you started reading all these books and using big words and making me feel stupid."

 No you didn't...did you? All you did was read up on ADHD and realize that sometimes it's really not okay to let Mituna do and say all the things he does because he can get hurt or he can hurt someone else's feelings. You were just worried about him after the tree accident, you think fiercely as memories of Mituna frowning at you, Mituna throwing tantrums, Mituna crying and Mituna slowly drifting away after you've taken your concern up a notch and started scolding him for almost everything he did because you started seeing him as less of a friend and more of dull child that needed looking after resurfaced in your mind.

"What, so your automatic response to that was to bully me and take away the only girl I ever liked?" you say testily, immediately dragging Latula into the conversation to take the limelight of blame away from you.

"No! Well, kinda...I didn't date Tula just to piss you off! I liked her, a lot. and you know, she liked me too. But I guess she liked _you_ too and I'm sorry."

You pause for a little bit and you shrug. "It's okay. I hated you for a lot of things but not really for that one. Well, I hated you for that too but not anymore. It was a long time ago. Besides, it was my fault too, I blew it. I could've asked Latula to by my girlfriend but i totally choked. and it's not like you're still with her anyway so you know...we're alright. I think. I'm sorry that the two of you split ways the way you did though."

"Meh." Mituna says, tugging on Butter's tail and dragging it kicking and unhappily meow-ing into his lap when it tries to dash by. "I don't think about it anymore. When I do," Mituna says, reaching for some of the many rubberbands on his wrist and pulling. He hisses a little when they snap against his skin. "and then I don't and I'm happy. I'm sorry too by the way. for treating you bad. I've been sorry since rehab, they kind of made me sorry about a lot of shit, but when i saw you again I became not sorry and got mad."

"Oh? Why?" you ask.

"Because you grew up hot and you were still an annoying shit."

The surprise and skepticism somehow makes you laugh. "I'm _sorry?_ "

Mituna just continues like it isn't weird at all. "You grew balls, you got angry instead of just crying and not fighting back, you're smart. Obviously your life went so much better than mine did and that made me mad and also you totally grew up _pretty_. Like. dude, dude. I would totally do you kay? I want to do you but you're such a shithead."

"Oh." is your oh so eloquent response. "...thank you?"

"You've been like that since highschool. It's like, you jumped through some sort of sexy portal between 11th grade and 12th grade because i remember, eryone just woke up one morning and it was like oh no Kankri's hot."

"You... really think I'm hot?" You ask skeptically, mentally back tracking through his words.

"Yeah." Mituna says, handing you his joint and rolling up another one for himself.

and three:  17 year old you could swear on your mother's life that he will not ever smoke weed or drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. 17 year old you was also 5000% certain that he wouldn't ever let his stoned roommate give him a blowjob. 17 year old you was so fucking wrong its hilarious.

After informing you of your apparent physical attractiveness, Mituna doesn't seem to want to _shut up_ about it. You think it was because you blushed and told him it was making you uncomfortable. Apparently he's twice as annoying when he's high and decides to be. At first it might have been jokes, he goes on and on about your junk and how he was surprised, the day you broke your arm, to find out that you were better hung than he expected. You snatch Butter from his arms and throw it at him. The cat has a spastic fit and almost claws Mituna's face but Mituna holds it captive and blows smoke in its face. It stumbles away kind of drunkenly when he lets it and if you weren't so baked you would have been concerned. But you were having trouble telling the difference between a second and an hour and besides, as soon as his cat runs away, Mituna goes right back to essentially hitting on you in the sleaziest way possible and that holds your attention for a good little while.

When you make a move to hit him to get him to stop, Mituna catches your hand and stares at it like its the most fascinating thing he's ever seen. Then he gets sidetracked into gushing about your fingers and how long and delicate they look, which opens up the floodgates to him talking about how girlish and pretty some of your features are. You get the feeling it's as close to being sweet Mituna can be and hearing him talk about you in such a way pokes at a libido that suddenly existed right then and there.

When he traces a line with his fingertip from your jaw down to the side of your neck, you jump and shudder, stunned by how sensitive you were to such a light touch.

If you were capable of recognizing how high you are, you would've reacted strangely to thinking thoughts like " _Axe doesn't actually smell that bad when I'm high. It especially doesn't smell bad on Mituna when I'm high_." or letting your face drop on his shoulder to sniff at his hoodie. But you aren't, all you know is that you feel nice and relaxed and everything seems either insignificant, amusing or downright funny. So you smoke a little bit more and when Mituna suggests that you should shotgun and you ask him what that means, and he just shuffles a bit closer and _shows_ you, you don't push him away.

Well, when his lips touch yours, you try to pull away but he keeps your mouth firmly glued to his with a hand on the back of your neck. He licks at your lips to get you to open them and succeeds when you gasp in surprise. You cough a little into his mouth when he lets the smoke trickle from his to yours and Mituna clamps his other hand over your nose, sealing his lips firmly over yours, cutting off oxygen and letting you only breathe smoke.

You jerk away, dizzy and gasping when Mituna lets up and he laughs, not letting you get all that far with the hand he still has on the back of your neck. You glare at him as you cough a little and he continues to laugh even as you slowly lift a hand up to wipe your mouth.  He doesn't let you and you realize with a skip of your pulse that he's way too close when he pulls your hand away and lets his mouth take its path to yours. Again. He doesn't try to suffocate you this time though, just moves his lips over your still ones like he's kissing you...which you realize when he pulls away with a small irritated noise and a soft murmur of "dammit, kiss back.", he actually is trying to do.

You're high enough to shut up and obey.

Somewhere from the fuzzy remnants of your logical self, sobriety fights viciously, trying to let itself be known and stop you because _what the fuck do you think you're doing?_ It only manages to make you push weakly at Mituna's shoulders as he sucks at your bottom lip and threads his fingers in your hair. Mituna just kisses you harder and murmurs against your mouth. "Just blame it on the pot later."

So you do, you blame it on being high later when in five minutes Mituna ends up shirtless under you. You blame it on being high later when five more minutes after that, _you_ end up pantsless, with Mituna's head bobbing between your legs.

You still blame it on the weed a couple of hours later, when Mituna finds you standing slumped, almost bent over and  half asleep on the kitchen table next to two empty bottles of vitamin water, still feeling kind of fuzzy.  He laughs at you and smacks your ass and you just let him. Then you ask him for his hoodie because you were cold. He refuses and you whine "Give me it! It's soft and kind of smells nice." and you really wouldn't mind wearing it even though there's a voice in your head that you don't have the strength to banish anymore that says you should.  Mituna grumbles but gives up the hoodie anyway before disappearing back into his room.

You fall asleep on the couch wearing his hoodie. Because you're too tired and your brain still kind of feels like it's stuffed with cotton. You blame it on the weed.

2 months later, when you find yourself kissing him again, you don't blame anything but yourself.

Things have been more or less normal up until that point. You and Mituna were both content to never speak of or acknowledge what happened in his room in any way shape or form until he stumbles into the apartment one night after probably consuming enough alcohol to knock out a bear. The clock says it's just an hour after midnight, you had to be awake in 6 hours and Mituna's being loud, obnoxious and stupid. You would've gladly slept away while he pawed at the door because he's too drunk to remember how to use his keys but after ignoring 8 calls to your phone, he takes to kicking, bashing and nearly _howling_ at the door. It takes you about half an hour to even get him into his room and 15 more minutes trying to get him to lay down, shut the fuck up and pass out already. He keeps trying to knock you over, keeps trying to hug you and shout in your ear and just when you're about to lose your patience and hit him over the head with his desk lamp, he grabs your wrists and leans in really close.

"-k, alright, imma go sleep. But kiss first."

"I _beg_ your pardon?"

"Kiiiss first." Mituna says, pointing at his lips.

"M-Mituna let go of me before I kick you in the shin."

"No. Kiss first" Mituna says, shaking your wrists and whining from the back of his throat like a petulant child.

"No!" You say, managing to yank one hand from his grip. He makes sure he keeps a death grip on the other one so you couldn't walk away in a huff as he starts to throw a full on tantrum, jumping and whining and spewing out phrases that don't really make complete sense in between asking for a kiss over and over and over and over until you finally give and grab his hair to get him to stay stilll and listen. "Alright! god dammit, fine!" You say and you really, really don't like the tremor that runs through you as you say it, and the way Mituna grins and the other, much stronger tremor that shoots through your spine when he dives right in, kisses you, and keeps kissing you until you feel heat creeping up your lower belly and your lips start moving with his. Just as your eyes slide shut, you push him away forcefully and wipe at your mouth with the back of your hand.

"There, you got your kiss, now for the last time, go to bed."

Mituna yells an OKAY! in your face and stumbles into his room, leaving you standing alone in your room, breathing a little faster than ususal and wondering what the fuck just happened.

About a month later, Mituna just out of nowhere, point blank and shameless, asks you if you want to sleep with him. Well, those aren't his exact words but said words make you cringe and you would rather not have them repeated, in your thoughts or otherwise. The proposition has you spitting out tea all over Kitkat, who was lounging on your lap serenely while you made review notes for an upcoming test. The tea-spitting is immediately followed by a long, long series of words that's more of you word-vomitting out of being caught off guard than actually lecturing Mituna on appropriate behaviour, the stigma of casual sex, etc.

Mituna groans and puts one hand over his ear, while the other goes to block any more words from coming out of your mouth. "God damn, its a simple yes no question. Don't have to make it so damn complicated. 'sides, I already sucked your dick once, its-".

"PLEASE refrain from saying the rest of that sentence."

Mituna rolls his eyes.  "What? It happened."

"And you think that's good enough grounds to proposition _me_ of all people?"

You can see one of Mituna's eyes squinting at you through his bangs like you're a braindead pigeon. "Well yeah. I mean, I even told you I would do you and like, we all know you need to get laid so" he trails off with a shrug.

You politely, or perhaps not all that politely refuse his offer even as you blush a bright, scarlet red and feel your pulse speed up just a little bit, egged on by a funny, warm, shaky feeling that goes down your spine and stays there long after Mituna rolls his eyes, shrugs and walks away.

To say that you grow akward around him after that would be a gargantuan understatement.

You avoid him probably as much as you did in the beginning or perhaps even more and whenever you end up being within 10 feet of each other, you get _so_ awkward it's ridiculous. And you _hate_ that you're being awkward because of what it means.

You know _exactly_ why you could barely stand to look him in the eye and it's not just because of the obvious.

You can't stand to look him in the eye because every time you do, you remember what he asked, you remember that at some point he wanted to sleep with you and might possibly still want to and you remember, no matter how _hard_ you try not to, the rapidly fading memory (that just _refuses_ to leave you no matter how fuzzy it gets) of him going down on you. Your traitorous brain couldn't help wandering whenever it does, to what ifs and could bes and for seconds at a time you secretly, seriously _consider_ his offer.

You've never been more confused with and ashamed of yourself.

This keeps happening for about another month after he asked and only seems to slowly get worse as time goes by. And as it turns out, the more ashamed you are seems to be directly proportional to how angry and defensive you get. And unfortunately for him, since he's the one who is within your immediate presence the most and also the cause of your negative storm of emotions, you turn rude and sometimes downright _hostile_ towards him, even when all he's done is ask you about the weather.

After a few weeks of feeling like  you've become Frollo and Mituna your white, possibly queer (if things ever  become normal again you have to ask him so that you don't mislabel him by accident), male Esmeralda, Mituna picks up on your mood. Well, to be more precise, he picks up on your mood when you all but bark at him when he asks you if he can steal a water bottle from your side of the fridge but this time he actually does something about it. He barges into your room unceremoniously while you're doing some reading for your english class and asks if he can borrow a shirt.

"No." You say, not looking up from your copy of 1984. "Please do not ask again. Learn to do your own laundry and learn to do it on time Mituna." You can feel your face ever so slightly shifting, holding back a scowl. You hear Mituna grumble and you hear his footsteps as he walks out of your room. You begin to relax but after only two or three steps, something hits you on the side of the head. You recognize it to be his hoodie after the overpowering smell of axe assaults your nose. You flail and rip the offfending piece of clothing away from your face and you turn to glare at Mituna.

"Very mature."

"Look who's talking." 

"Excuse me? What is that supposed to mean?"

"I ask you to bang and you get so offended like you're too fucking good for me and now you're treating me like shit."

You open your mouth to retort but Mituna cuts you off with a startled toss of his head and a small "Oh." he scoffs and he shakes his head before laughing, loud and in a way that is entirely not pleasant. "Oh I get it."

That makes your stomach lurch with a nauseating jolt of combined shame and anger.

"This is bound to be interesting, what, exactly is it that you get?" You ask, sounding more than a little rude.

In a way that you never would have expected ever, Mituna crosses his arms and smirks the most infuriating, shit-eating, all _knowing_ smirk you've ever seen in your life at you.

"You want to bang me too. But you don't. But you _do_."

Your jaw drops and in the few seconds of silence where you just sit there, gawping in silent mortification at him, Mituna's smirk widens in the most infuriating way, knowing he's got you. A hot flash of embarassed anger floods your system at the sight of it, which grows hotter and more intense when a tiny trickle of want joins the mix.

"How _dare_ you-" You begin, suddenly on your feet and stomping quickly towards him with quick, heavy steps.  As soon as your close enough to be defeaning when you shout, Mituna grabs you by the back of the neck and just smashes your mouths together.  You cry out in surprise against his mouth and he forces his tongue between your lips.  You shove him away and _smack_ him, right in the head, hard enough to make your hand sting like you just hit a brick wall. You gasp a little as soon as your hand makes contact, knowing you've hit him a little too hard but you don't apologize because he deserves it.

A second later, you regret not apologizing when Mituna straightens up. The second you see his green eye glaring at you intensely from behind his bangs, you know you fucked up and you're going to pay fo- and you don't even get to finish that thought because faster than you can blink, Mituna reels his arm back and socks you in the face.

You double over and stumble a few steps. You desperately try to stay on your feet as your head reels from the explosion of pain in your face and tries to remember which way is up and how to move your legs. You _just_ avoid falling head first unto the floor when Mituna tackles you and the next thing you know the two of you are rolling around, trying to pummel each other into the floorboards.  The two of you fill your room with the sound of angry swears and insults. You're at a severe disadvantage, being smaller, more feeble and having been in zero physical fights before in your life but you still give it your all. You manage to get a hit or two in but predictably, you end up pinned under Mituna, and holding onto his wrists for dear life, in an attempt to save yourself from getting punched even more. You more or less succeed and when he realizes you've taken away the use of his arms, Mituna, of _all_ things, starts to grind his hips against yours.

A jolt of heat shoots down your spine and a surprised, high-pitched gasp escapes your throat.

"What the fuck are you _doing_? Stop that!"

"Why? You like it. Does it make you mad? It makes you mad doesn't it? Because you're just like everyone else.  Never seen anyone be such a _bitch_ about being horny."

"Mitu-"

"God, shut the fuck up" he growls, leaning down to force your mouth shut with a kiss. He pins your hands above your head while he does it and you growl right back at him, even as the forceful way he's kissing you and the fact that he's still grinding down on you sparks an undeniable want in you. You bite at his lips, hard. but instead of pulling away, Mituna just bites you back, tugging at your lip with his teeth and licking his way into your mouth hungrily. When he pulls away to breathe, you gasp, partly because of the oxygen deprivation and partly because he moves on to bite and suck at your ear, your jaw, your neck.

"I fucking hate you."

"We can be fucking and hating at the same time if you just shut the fuck up." he says, pulling one hand free to force it down your pants. Your hand twitches as it shuts down the initial impulse to hurt him and decides that it wants to move things forward not back. and then decides why not have both and grabs a fistful of dirty blonde hair and _pulls_. Mituna cries out against your throat and laughs. "Now we're getting somewhere."

On that day, you find out that hate sex, something that has baffled you for years and you'd never actually fully believed in, is totally and undoubtedly real. and it is still stupid and makes no sense and you don't understand it because you can not, for the life of you,figure out _how_ it is that you and Mituna going from beating the shit out of each other to having messy, angry, near violent sex on your floor is actually a _thing_ that _happened_. You also don't understand at all how Mituna making you an ice pack and shoving it at the black eye he gave you while laughing and playfully biting your ear after is something that could and does happen after hate sex.

You also do not know how hate-sex can be a recurring thing. Which it turns out to be.

 Kankri Vantas, what the _fuck_ has your life turned into?

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I plan to turn this into a series but we'll see. I do have a tendency of not coming through with plans sometimes


End file.
